Democratic Money Manifesto

Draft #2 may 30th, 2017.

We believe in absolute monetary freedom. We believe that all persons hold the inalienable human right to create and to operate their own monetary system. We believe that the freedom to operate any symbolic system with volunteer participants is analogous to the freedom of speech and should be protected as such.

We believe in monetary pluralism. We expect that humanity will be best served by a variety of monetary systems that compete freely in capturing people’s social, political and economic attention. We not only hold that forcing people to use specific symbolic systems under threat of force to be a crime against humanity, but we also believe that this simply doesn’t work. The voluntary or coerced use of totalitarian currencies creates societies that are very vulnerable to the abuse of that monopolized social power.

We believe that every human alive should be paid a sum of money every day. We believe that money, in a trade society, is a political right and therefore no person should ever be deprived of it. We thus believe in the creation of many Democratic Monetary Systems that are open to the participation of all humans, unconditionally, and that pay money sums to all of them regularly (ideally, every day).

We believe in the ideal of Universal Basic Income. We believe the moral duty of all monetary systems is to provide every human being alive with sufficient trade value, in the form of money, to cover for their basic human needs. Whereas a political, social, economic or technocratic debate may or may not be had with respect to how better organize the surplus finances of a trade society wherein every person already has their Basic Income guaranteed, we are convinced that no such debate can be had for the basic component, the basic payment amount for people. The debate of whether we should or shouldn’t pay an Universal Basic Income to all persons is necessarily a moral one, and we believe that debate has already ended: we must pay the Universal Basic Income to all persons. All of them. Unconditionally. For as long as our society is a society of money and of trade.

We invite you to create your Democratic Monetary System. We invite all creative, able persons, to design and implement their own Democratic Monetary Systems that are open to providing an income of their money to all human beings alive, unconditionally. We will need many such systems, with scales and scopes very small to very large, if we are to reliably and securely provide every person on this planet with a guaranteed income that must cover for their basics — and perhaps, and eventually, much more than that.